


New Things

by sirenalley



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Cabeswater Returns, Established Relationship, Fluff, Kissing, M/M, Post-Canon, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-20
Updated: 2019-07-20
Packaged: 2020-07-09 12:07:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19887478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sirenalley/pseuds/sirenalley
Summary: “Come over here,” Ronan said. He was good at faking bravery, Adam noticed, like he noticed the new things hemmed into the new Cabeswater.It was hard to believe they once were two separate people. Two separate minds that had, up to this point, spent their entire lives severed apart.





	New Things

**Author's Note:**

> as i pretty much blazed through this series at the speed of light, this is my love letter to two perfect boys.

The new Cabeswater possessed many identical features of the old, Adam noticed, except in the strangest, smallest detail—as though someone had drawn out a thicket of green growth and then gone back over it with a fresh coat of paint. It was in the trees: tall, glorious, ancient. As Adam strolled through them, his hands touched everything they could as if recalling their autonomy. His palms tracked over each trunk, fingertips bent down to trace roots. Sometimes he picked up shiny pebbles to hold and carry around.

Adam stopped walking beneath the canopy of a massive oak. In its shadow, the air was cooler, a pocket of soothing shelter amid another humid Virginian summer. He could make the season anything here with enough thought and intention, but he didn’t want to. Better to experience this refashioned Cabeswater as it was manifested out of the dreamer’s mind.

Turning eyes upward, he studied the branches that hung dormant in a flat, stale afternoon. Summer was a dead thing, but it was still a _thing_ , and it contained majesty of its own. All of the grass baked in the heat, all of the sky was a mirror of the sun, all of the world left still. Thunderstorms cleaned everything out like a ritualistic baptism. Henrietta wore on a tireless and eternal existence while Cabeswater nestled in its center, a place he would always return to, over and over.

And occasionally he would come across something like this.

The oak had gold leaves and silver bark. The leaves shimmered in daylight, thin and papery and—when he reached up to pluck one—waxen to the touch. It looked like a tree laminated on a card or embroidered onto an expensive throw pillow. Except this tree was real, it was breathing and living, and he could feel it in his mind.

There were other new things in the new Cabeswater. 

Near a river, he found a bicycle coiled up in ivy with steel frame and chipped color resembling the rusted one he’d pedaled around through high school. Near a risen hill, he found an ugly green and orange blanket thrown across the grass with a tiny plastic model-toy car on top. On the branches of a small pink maple, he found a patterned Aglionby tie hanging loose with a secondhand Aglionby sweater folded in half beside it. This one made him cringe at the wrinkles plaguing the fabric.

He wondered if he could wander through this dreamspace for days and find pieces of himself, pieces of Ronan, knitted into the material of the forest. He wanted to do it. He wanted to be here as long as it would keep him.

A voice split the air behind him, more animalistic than human, and he saw Opal sprint past on hooved feet like a wild dog in an unranged and unfenced backyard. Somewhere above her head, Chainsaw’s frantic wings flapped to keep up. 

And then Ronan was at his back. “Hey asshole, who said you could walk around in my head touching things?”

“Wait, you’re not asleep, are you?” Adam laughed. “Are we back at the Barns?”

It felt like a dream. It held all the flags of a fantasy, untouchable, a moment suspended impossibly in time perfect and forever. His mind was loose, and Ronan looked both wild and indolent when he turned to see. 

“No,” Ronan said what he already knew. “‘Cause I wouldn’t be dreaming this. Isn’t that thing the ugliest abomination you ever put your eyes on?”

He was talking about the blanket. Adam was smiling. He smiled so much these days he could feel it ache in his mouth. “I don’t know. I kind of like the colors.”

“You got shit taste. No surprise there.” 

There was a brief period where Adam thought he would lose his affinity to Cabeswater in the effort to resurrect their Raven King, but it turned out that its death was the beginning of a second life, like a severed thread restitched into newness, and Adam was once again bound up in its service. Hands and eyes tethered to root and soil. 

The magician who was sworn to it, and the dreamer who had recreated it.

There was no denying the specialness of Cabeswater to both of them, but he found himself almost shy now, eyes on the blanket, then on the sky, then on the distant tree-line. It didn’t help Ronan was roaming shirtless, tattoo made of dark lines and flowers and feathers and beaks all at once.

“Come over here,” Ronan said. He was good at faking bravery, Adam noticed, like he noticed the new things hemmed into the new Cabeswater. 

It was hard to believe they once were two separate people. Two separate minds that had, up to this point, spent their entire lives severed apart. 

Ronan’s arms were a solid circle around his shoulders. He felt the warm, open palms of Ronan’s callused hands against his cheeks as one thumb traced his dead ear—he couldn’t hear its progress across his skin, but he could feel it wander over the delicate shell and lobe. It didn’t matter how many times they kissed. That same shyness seized him in the moments just before. It fell in a quiet curtain over his entire awareness.

Their lips met in careful, tentative question, and then it grew hungrier, and again he felt the world open up beneath his feet and his belly tense with a sudden blow of want.

Ronan was so dark against him, a streak of gorgeous and dangerous realness, pressed flat to the dusty lines of his own body. He could feel Ronan steer him back against the stiff bark of a tree. There was a faint, almost hysterical thought of filthiness, because Cabeswater was a living creature and they were making out where it could see them in plain light, but this was their place too. And it knew that. It knew _them_. Both of them as one entity, one force of will.

He felt Ronan’s clever tongue licking into his mouth, and his own hands surrendered into their temptation to wander the broad plane of Ronan’s back, studying the difference between blank skin and tattoo. 

A wail came behind them. They broke apart; Adam could feel the burning beacon of heat in his face unmatched by summer. Behind them, Opal stood with her hands planted on her tiny hips, and she shouted again, a bird-like chirruping. 

Adam began to laugh as Ronan cursed, scooped up a harmless handful of dry dirt, and flung it in her direction. “Scram, you little brat!”

Time resumed. Dappled light cut through the leaves of the golden-silver oak, and the day went on with his heart.


End file.
